Anticommunism and Anticolonialism

T hat there is an inevitable relationship between a nation's foreign policy and its domestic politics, everyone knows. In that sense, therefore, the title of this paper cannot be said to suggest any major intellectual breakthroughs in our thinking about international relations. However, when we closely examine the nature of U.S.-Indian relations from the time India achieved its independence in 1947 until the present, one must look long and hard to find a more striking example of how divergent historical experience can combine with contemporary domestic political constraints to produce a painful disparity between positive expectations and real outcomes. For this is a case involving two nations, whose political systems were compatible and whose people genuinely liked each other from the beginning. They commenced their association in an atmosphere of high idealism and then saw it gradually sink into a pattern of mutual frustration, exasperation, and pique largely because neither side could evolve a foreign policy that accommodated the other's vision of how security and social justice in the postwar world must be achieved and maintained. I do not propose to deal with the entire spectrum of this tortured history of unfulfilled expectations that often reads like a marriage perpetually in danger of going on the rocks, but only with what I think was probably the most crucial early stage in this tearful saga-viz., the years immediately following the end of World War II when Harry S. Truman became president of the United States by default and Jawaharlal Nehru became prime minister of India by acclamation

Epistemology · Foreign policy · Idealism · Independence (probability theory · International relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Indian Economic and Social Development · Law · Philosophy